11/09/2006 @ 6:00PM

Most Important Technological Innovations

These are truly fantastic times in which we live. Every year–every day, even–has witnessed unprecedented innovation: hybrid cars, birth control patches and iTunes, to name just a few. But determining which scientific and technological inventions merited distinction as the greatest breakthroughs of the last century proved as formidable and fraught an assignment as, say, choosing the greatest baseball players of the last hundred years. (What are the criteria: A great pitching arm? Consistency? Impact on the team and the fans?) It simply cannot be done without serious risk of oversight or, even worse, poor judgment.

So consider this a template, a mere starting point. This list includes life-altering inventions like television, but it omits any of its abbreviation-prone progeny (the VCR, DVD, DVR, HDTV and so on). After all, it was TV that spawned the evolution, the countless patents, the media moguls, the successes and failures. (Beta, anyone?) TV was a no-brainer.

But what about nuclear power, which also lands on this list? Given nuclear’s checkered history, still uncertain future and the general fallout (pardon the pun), the debate continues about whether it should even be in use, let alone heralded as a breakthrough innovation. But this list doesn’t cast judgment as to which advances are useful or worthwhile. The World Wide Web is included, though it inspired its own proliferation of hackers, hucksters and cyber-baddies. Draw your own conclusions as to whether the good outweighs the bad.

This list does skew toward computers and their related technologies. The invention of the computer may be this century’s printing press, a radical device in its own time that simply and irrevocably changed the course of history in virtually every field–business, politics, education, religion and so on. The Electronic Digital Computer was invented in 1942 by Iowa State physicist John V. Atanasoff after “an evening of scotch and 100 mph rides.” His back-of-napkin design resulted in a hulking 700-pound, desk-sized contraption.

Twelve years later, John W. Backus led a group of IBM engineers to develop Fortran, the first high-level computer programming language. By the early 1980s, Bill Gates and his merry band of Silicon Valley nerds had devised the progenitor of Windows, a user-friendly interface that inspired the personal computing revolution. By 1991, with the birth of the World Wide Web, computer users worldwide were effectively granted digital visas to travel through cyberspace. While air travel may have bridged the distance between the opposite ends of the world, it was the computer that had the two sides actually converging.

There are doubtlessly glaring omissions here . The last century produced more advances than arguably any period in human history. Perhaps limiting ourselves to just ten picks was na����ve. Indeed, where are nylon, radar or fiber optics? The eureka!-inducing nanotech gizmos? What about biometrics and RFID? And how about space exploration? Go ahead, tell us (gently) what we’ve missed at comments@forbes.net. Oh yeah, and what about e-mail?